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I'm in the market for a new laptop soon and am considering a Framework one. Would the 13th gen or the AMD version be good enough for basic photo editing? My wif

by jareds 4y ago

I'm in the market for a new laptop soon and am considering a Framework one. Would the 13th gen or the AMD version be good enough for basic photo editing? My wife is starting to get interested in photography. It would be nice if this could be a shared machine that I'd use most of the time and she would use for photo editing. If photo editing was something she wanted to do frequently she could always get her own machine specifically specked for that.

seanp2k2 4y ago
The biggest advantage for AMD IMO is efficiency and thermals. AMD beats Intel perf per watt hands down — it’s not even close. Intel can’t shrink their process node fast enough because they use their own fabs. AMD uses TSMC and benefits from process advances. Intel has new fabs with better technology coming online in the coming years, but Apple M1/2 and AMD 5xxx but truly 7xxx have them well beat. Given that laptops have physical size constraints and a 100 watt hour battery max because of that stupid FAA rule (and mfgs don’t want to try to explain that they’ve made a laptop that you can’t technically take on a plane, even though mall cop TSA guards very likely wouldn’t catch it), there’s only so much heat you can dissipate with laptop heat sinks (around 200 watts for the latest and greatest cooling solutions, a lot less for thin and lights), so performance per watt is what laptop perf is all about. Intel 12th gen used to be better than AMD 6xxx in single-thread until it rapidly overheated and started throttling, but the 7xxx stuff matches or beats 13th gen Intel on single-thread. For multi-thread, the best current Intel designs are 8 fast cores and 16 Atom cores. The AMD 7945HX is 16 fast cores. Combined with the difficulty in scheduling on asymmetric cores (Win11 does a decent job and is aware of this but it’s not perfect), 16 real cores usually wins for tasks that require real horsepower. The Intel solution is decent for handling many small background tasks (chrome tabs, running Spotify, Slack, etc) but there’s still a lot of context switching happening.
- brucethemoose2 4y ago
  That was true previous gen, but Intel's efficiency cores make them quite competitive this time around. The 7000 series's advantage is now everything else: IO, the GPU, faster memory and such. I dont even count the 7945HX as a laptop CPU though. That is a $2K+ desktop replacement, complete with the same hot idling the desktop chips have.
  - kcb 4y ago
    I'm still seeing equivalent AMD based laptops with much higher battery life ratings.
    - brucethemoose2 4y ago
      No surprise there. Intel turbo'd way too aggressively the last few gens. But if you schedule most things to the E cores with ProcessLasso/Aniancy, I think you can squeeze much more out of them.
      - jeffbee 4y ago
        There are also Intel parts that contain only efficiency cores, like the N200.
brucethemoose2 4y ago
Yeah. TBH pretty much any good laptop could handle photo editing these days. You probably want the AMD version. The bigger question is whether it can run stable diffusion quickly. And if you dont know what I am talking about, I encourage you to check out the InvokeAI infinite canvas or the Stable Diffusion Photoshop plugin... its revolutionary.
Macha 4y ago
> Would the 13th gen or the AMD version be good enough for basic photo editing Pretty much anything from the last decade could handle "basic photo editing" from consumer cameras.

by jareds 4y ago

seanp2k2 4y ago

The biggest advantage for AMD IMO is efficiency and thermals. AMD beats Intel perf per watt hands down — it’s not even close. Intel can’t shrink their process node fast enough because they use their own fabs. AMD uses TSMC and benefits from process advances. Intel has new fabs with better technology coming online in the coming years, but Apple M1/2 and AMD 5xxx but truly 7xxx have them well beat. Given that laptops have physical size constraints and a 100 watt hour battery max because of that stupid FAA rule (and mfgs don’t want to try to explain that they’ve made a laptop that you can’t technically take on a plane, even though mall cop TSA guards very likely wouldn’t catch it), there’s only so much heat you can dissipate with laptop heat sinks (around 200 watts for the latest and greatest cooling solutions, a lot less for thin and lights), so performance per watt is what laptop perf is all about. Intel 12th gen used to be better than AMD 6xxx in single-thread until it rapidly overheated and started throttling, but the 7xxx stuff matches or beats 13th gen Intel on single-thread. For multi-thread, the best current Intel designs are 8 fast cores and 16 Atom cores. The AMD 7945HX is 16 fast cores. Combined with the difficulty in scheduling on asymmetric cores (Win11 does a decent job and is aware of this but it’s not perfect), 16 real cores usually wins for tasks that require real horsepower. The Intel solution is decent for handling many small background tasks (chrome tabs, running Spotify, Slack, etc) but there’s still a lot of context switching happening.

brucethemoose2 4y ago
That was true previous gen, but Intel's efficiency cores make them quite competitive this time around. The 7000 series's advantage is now everything else: IO, the GPU, faster memory and such. I dont even count the 7945HX as a laptop CPU though. That is a $2K+ desktop replacement, complete with the same hot idling the desktop chips have.
- kcb 4y ago
  I'm still seeing equivalent AMD based laptops with much higher battery life ratings.
  - brucethemoose2 4y ago
    No surprise there. Intel turbo'd way too aggressively the last few gens. But if you schedule most things to the E cores with ProcessLasso/Aniancy, I think you can squeeze much more out of them.
    - jeffbee 4y ago
      There are also Intel parts that contain only efficiency cores, like the N200.

brucethemoose2 4y ago

Yeah. TBH pretty much any good laptop could handle photo editing these days. You probably want the AMD version. The bigger question is whether it can run stable diffusion quickly. And if you dont know what I am talking about, I encourage you to check out the InvokeAI infinite canvas or the Stable Diffusion Photoshop plugin... its revolutionary.

Macha 4y ago

> Would the 13th gen or the AMD version be good enough for basic photo editing Pretty much anything from the last decade could handle "basic photo editing" from consumer cameras.